


five years from now

by lameafpun



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, M/M, Mutual Pining, Other, Pining, gender neutral reader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26489347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lameafpun/pseuds/lameafpun
Summary: In your dreams you're lonely but the color blue feels like a hug and it's like you were never lonely at all.
Relationships: Arthur Morgan/Reader
Kudos: 41





	five years from now

It isn’t much that you remember. It’s barely even a whole minute of the entire hazy dream but you can remember, viscerally, the pang in your chest it made you feel — like you missed him even though he was sitting across from you eating the thick, almost gelatinous, meat stew Pearson served every night, barely three feet away. Fire crackled in the background and fragments of conversation drifted through camp. There was a fleck of gravy on his chin.

The teasing you would usually levy at him gets caught in your chest as he looks up, feeling the weight of your gaze on him, and he furrows his brow.

You clear your throat. “Got something on your chin.”

He wipes it away with the back of his hand and then brushes it off on his pants with a grunt. Pearson does something downright unnatural to his stew that makes the gravy practically cling to any cloth surface it comes across and those pants will definitely need to be washed later. Scrubbing in the aftermath of a stew incident is a horrible, horrible process but all you can think of is the blue of his eyes. You’ve never looked that close before, but they’re just so . . . blue. The same shade as the sky.

Behind your eyes, the dream plays again. You’re alone in the beginning. It’s an agonizing sort of loneliness, not regular solitude but a stark kind of isolationyou hadn’t really experienced in a while. Desolation. And then something blue had appeared, wrapping around you like a hug, and it was _addicting_. Self-imposed exile had grown bitter and this new warmth felt like the most important thing in the world.

Then you had woken up next to Arthur with an empty feeling in your chest. He had torn something out, something you needed that you hadn’t even meant to give away and he didn’t even know. Tears had come to your eyes then, in that creaky room where you could hear absolutely everyone and everything in that inn, in the shared room he bought because it was cheaper. Convenience had never bothered you before — the bed was big enough — but now it burned as insecurities you didn’t even know you had swelled in your chest like vomit. You wanted a hug immediately after waking up but he was still asleep and you knew that it would just hurt even more. Not to mention the fact you felt weird now, like the hugs you took were hugs under false pretenses.

“You alright?”

It’s a fight to keep from jerking to attention in your seat. The twang of Arthur’s voice is anything but sudden or unexpected — though he doesn’t talk all that much during meals he’ll throw out a few comments about the day or asking you about yours if he wasn’t there himself — but maybe you had been losing a bit too much of yourself in your melancholy (it hurts that he cares, a hurt that radiates out from your heart with each beat, as much as it soothes sweetly).

“Of course.” You drag your spoon through the stew and watch as the gravy slowly oozes back together at the speed of a particularly swift snail. The sheen on it is similarly foreboding but then the smell curls up to you and you curse Pearson for making the stew such a mix of contradictions; it looks like a monstrosity you would find out of the back end of a horse in poor health but it smells like something from an expensive Saint Denis restaurant.

“Don’t look alright.” His eyes glint with the light of the camp fire.

You feel so, so warm.

“What should I look like then?”

He considers that. A gaze like sapphires bores into you, reading the lines in your face like the morning newspaper. His spoon hangs between his twitching fingers — some sort of impulse he gets when he wants to write in that journal of his, a tic you had noticed a while ago. A lot of your time in the beginning of your friendship had been spent just staring at him and you wonder how you didn’t put everything together before the dream.

“Not like you’ve just watched someone shoot yer dog.”

“. . . What?”

A surface kind of frustration edges into the corners of Arthur’s small frown.  
“Like,” He grunts and gestures to your face, “Like you’ve lost something important.”

Your breath catches; you try to smother it as you lean forward and push Pearson’s stew to the side, chin in your palm. Play along. “What do you think I’ve lost, cowboy?”

Again, there’s a pause as he thinks the question over. It isn’t as long a pause as you thought it would be. “You sweet on someone in Blackwater?”

You choke out a laugh.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

His spoon scrapes against the bottom of his bowl with a sharp, ugly sound. “They break your heart?”

“In a way.”

“’S that supposed to mean?” The baseline frown Arthur always seems to have is more sincere, angrier.

“They stole it — didn’t notice at first, actually — haven’t given it back, and it hurts terribly.”

“‘M sorry.”

He didn’t know, you’re absolutely _sure_ he didn’t, but his apology gave you a heart attack anyway. Covering panic with flippancy had always worked for you though.  
“What for, Mister Morgan?”

“For whatever dumbass I’m gonna havta shoot for breaking your heart.”

This time your laugh is louder and the tears that come to your eyes are tears of hilarity. Your laughter tapers off into giggles when you register the serious set to Arthur’s face. Warmth suffuses your chest at the same moment pain lances through your heart.

“I’ll be fine, _dad_.”

There’s a particular look he gets when you call him that and it makes you cackle every time. _This_ — the easy friendship, the familiarity — settles into the air around you and you’re the most comfortable you have ever been.

Which, of course, he has to ruin (that’s not fair, you ruined it before he even worked up the nerve to care).

“The gang cares about you.” Did Dutch pick up a doctor somewhere along the way because it sure sounded like someone was getting their teeth pulled.

You sigh to yourself. You were being unfair again.

“I would hope so.”

“No — what I mean —“

“If I died they’d be very sad and would attend my funeral and somehow make it all end in a shoot out, yes, I’ve met them too, Arthur.”

He doesn’t laugh, or chuckle, or even smile. His eyes peek out from underneath the brim of his hat (you suspected it was either attached to his head or just part of his body at this point) and spears you to your seat with an intense look that nearly falters when you make eye contact.

Even as he’s staring into your eyes he weighs each word with care and you wait for the words to come to him. “The gang is all the family I got. You’re part of that, too.”

With a dip of his head, his eyes are hidden again and you lean back into your seat. You suck in a breath.

“I…” _I think I love you,_ “Didn’t know you cared so much, cowboy.”

A renewed tension stills him and it was the wrong thing to say — you’ve said the _wrong thing_

You reach across the table and rest your hand on his, on the one holding the spoon just a little too tightly. Even this simple touch sparks the want for _more_ — more hugs, more contact, more smiles, just _more_. It doesn’t matter. Whatever Arthur wants to give you need to have and it kills you when you pull away again as he looks back at you.

“I do think of y’all as my family.” Your voice is soft and you channel as much sincerity into your small smile as you can. “My heart aside, that hasn’t changed. Never will, cowboy.”

A smile, sharp and with a particular curve you recognize as self deprecating, cuts across his face. You don’t like that it’s there, and don’t like your part in putting it there. “We’ll see about that in another few years.”

If you can’t say what you want to, if you’re too much of a coward in the face of the possibility of his rejection, then you’ll give him your loyalty instead. You’ll make sure he understands that, at least.

“I said it’ll never change, Arthur, and I mean it. I love y - y’all.”

Some of the tension leaves his frame and your near slip up is worth seeing his shoulders relax and his fingers twitching with that creative itch. Tonight you can sleep and dream of saying the words for real and feel blue the same shade of the sky in the early afternoon wrap around you like a hug.


End file.
